


Two Thirty

by heliocharis



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: (sorry folks), Banter, Gen, I think technically this is a songfic, Mentions of Blood, Teeth Are Not Bones, amateur dentistry, as a treat, doing little a flesh magic on yourself, getting roasted by your bff as self care, gratuitous anatomical detail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26181295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliocharis/pseuds/heliocharis
Summary: Palamedes Sextus, aged nineteen, becomes tired of the pain from his erupting wisdom teeth and deals to them himself with flesh magic. Camilla offers advice.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 83





	Two Thirty

**Author's Note:**

> This idea started as a joke, but turns out the joke was on me, because I wrote it.

The day was cold and dark, the same as it had been for months. Dominicus shone, from its seat in the looming depths of space, on someone else. The Library was dull. The Master Warden was miserable. He sat at his desk, chin in his hand, pushing mournfully with his first two fingers on his left mandibular ramus.

“Cam,” he said, “are your teeth hurting too?”

His cavalier stopped fidgeting with her eraser and looked up, face blank. “What?”

“Your wisdom teeth,” Palamedes said. “Mine are killing me. I think all of them have decided to start up at once.”

It was, in his opinion, manifestly unfair. To be beset by all four teeth simultaneously felt like an insult. Both his parents had warned him that theirs had appeared at the age he was now (nineteen), but they’d had one, maybe two coming through at a time. Juno said one of hers had come in at a bad angle, so as to cut into her cheek and give her an ulcer, which she claimed had been painful enough to prevent her from talking for three days (Palamedes did not believe this was true).

Camilla said, “No.”

Palamedes lifted his head off his hand and worked his jaw in every direction he could. It didn’t help much, but his temporomandibular joints did make quite a lot of noise.

“Warden, please stop doing that,” Camilla said. “There’s anti-inflammatory in your second drawer.”

“Oh.” Palamedes found it next to some near-expired vitamin tablets and a box of paper clips. He took the standard dose for persons aged between twelve and seventy with no underlying conditions except for terminal necromancy, then one of the tablets for good measure. It tasted like formulated dust. “Thank you. How long has that been there?”

“Since the last time you decided to argue with Oversight Body about preventative maintenance and I got a headache that reached all the way to my cauda equina,” Camilla said.

“Right. Well. I hate this.”

“You could go to the clinic,” Camilla said.

“For what?” Palamedes said, slumping in his chair with all the melancholy in his wretched, impractical frame. “So they can tell me they’re fine, and they’re just going to hurt for the near future and probably longer, at a frequency and duration I have no way of predicting, and this is just the cost of being alive? I might as well ask them how to conserve the hypothetically dwindling First House bird population. Or get Archaeobiology to agree on standardised referencing. Or bake a cake.”

Camilla looked at him.

“You’re no help,” Palamedes said, from his new low. “Go and play with your sword.”

If Camilla the Sixth enjoyed one thing, it was following spurious orders for the sake of being difficult. “You should consider it, too, Warden,” she said on her way out the door. “It might make you feel better.”

* * *

Several weeks later, Palamedes was reading on his couch (which was, being the only one he had, more realistically Camilla’s) when there was a sudden pain in his ear as if someone had stabbed a needle into it. He paused and waited for a minute: it continued. This was of some concern to him. He’d never been prone to ear infections, his sinuses were in passable condition, and he hadn’t exerted himself in such a way as to bleed from the ears in ages. He put his book down and pressed hard on the front of his temporal bone, to no effect. Displeasure compelled him to drag his fingers across his face, following the zygomatic process to the zygomatic bone itself, dropping down to the alveolar process of the maxilla.

In the alveolar process of the maxilla lay, ostensibly, the problem. It had to be the teeth. This was not to exonerate the lower ones, which were probably equally responsible.

It hurt. More than that, it hurt on top of the existing pain from the teeth forcing their way through his soft tissues. It was shit. Palamedes dug up some anti-inflammatory and went to bed.

He slept decently, and woke after some hours to Camilla perching on the bed like the world’s most predictable portent.

“Are you sick?” she asked, by way of a greeting. “Dying? Both?”

Palamedes sat up and reached for his glasses. “Pessimistic of you,” he said. “I wouldn’t get away with talking like that.”

“On you, Warden,” Camilla said, “it would be an improvement.”

Not having any extra pillows, Palamedes lay back onto the headboard. “My jaw was hurting,” he said. He did feel better. He did not, however, want to give Camilla any satisfaction by admitting that sleeping had improved his general condition, even though she would be taking it anyway.

Camilla’s eyebrow went up. This was out of cynicism, rather than inquiry. “Your teeth again?”

“Did you know they can make your ears hurt, too?”

“Your ears.”

“Stabbing pain, inside my ear. I don’t know what else it would be.”

The expression on Camilla’s face, invisible to the untrained eye, suggested that she would happily provide him with an aetiology for stabbing pain in his ear.

“Maybe I’ll get them looked at,” Palamedes muttered, rubbing at his sternum. He paused. “No, actually, I have another idea. What could I pay you to just cut them out of there.”

Camilla grinned. This inspired in Palamedes a number of feelings, some of them quite bad. She leaned slightly forward. “Warden,” she said, “if you let me use my dagger I’ll do it for free.”

Palamedes laced his fingers over his diaphragm. “Hmm. Possibly untested. I’ll run it by the committee.”

“Do that,” Camilla said. “Collections will be at your office in an hour.”

“Ah, yes, to collect—”

“—All the joy and happiness from your pitiable shell, and put it into the shredder. I know. I already got out the papers.”

Palamedes sighed.

“And the coffee.”

Palamedes got up.

* * *

Palamedes’ mirror, as usual, was set too low on the wall. He had never bothered to move it, as he felt that having to bend down to shave was an acceptable element of danger, and kept him on his toes. So to speak. It was only now that its position was a true detriment to him: while he was staring into his own wide open mouth, trying to assess the state of his third molars.

He couldn’t see a whole lot. To get a look at the maxillary ones he’d have to find a hand mirror somewhere (how many had he left in the lab?). He could feel them with his tongue, though, two foothills of enamel in the wet plains of his gums. They were probably much smaller than they felt, which seemed unreasonable, because one had been hurting enough to distract him from everything he’d tried to do. There was no pattern to it that he could deduce and that might have been the worst thing of all.

The mandibular teeth he could see. The first cusps poked out with what he was certain was malicious intent. The important detail was that they seemed to be oriented correctly, _id est_ , not sideways, which he would have interpreted as some kind of punishment.

He tongued anxiously around them, upper right round to the lower.

Behind him, Camilla tapped her foot. “Are you going to let me do my teeth or not?”

“Don’t you have your own basin,” Palamedes asked, moving out of her way, “somewhere else?”

“It didn’t come with the entertainment package,” Camilla said.

* * *

There were, associated with the House of the Sixth, at least a dozen tooth experts, scholars whose arcane knowledge of the non-bony hard tissues was rivalled only by their penchant for threatening to exsanguinate each other (why this persisted in the modern generations was not well understood). There was a whole section of literature in the form of textbooks, papers, and diagrams scribbled on napkins.

Palamedes consulted none of it. He was the Master Warden. The tooth-fanciers could go on about protocones and cervicoenamel lines until their tongues dropped out, but Palamedes Sextus knew a thing or two about a thing or two, and most importantly he knew how to use it.

He’d worked it out like this: there was plenty of space in his mouth for the teeth, and thank God for that; on that basis, he wouldn’t need them extracted after they grew in, and they could just hang out in there and serve their obsolescent purpose. The obvious conclusion was that he should simply employ flesh magic to draw them out all in one go and save himself months of pain. It would hurt in the short term, but at this point he was tired enough of the recurring ache that he’d take it, and this way he wouldn’t have to be prodded at by the adepts. If it worked—which it would—that would be six problems solved: four teeth, the pain, and Camilla’s profoundly unhelpful attitude (towards this, at least).

Some people might say this was an extremely stupid idea, but had he asked? He was Palamedes, he was nineteen, and he’d never learned how to refuse himself a challenge. He sat in the cool dimness of his bathroom, an old song playing in his head, and laid his hand on the right side of his jaw. Along the stretch of each hemiarch his teeth were slotted in even array. Genetics had given him decent teeth as well as a brain: he gave silent thanks to his long-lost pharyngeal arches, to every odontoblast, to amelogenin. Then he closed his eyes and prepared to face God and walk backwards into hell.

Determining the sequence had been easy enough. The structures he could have recited in his sleep. The theory was unassailable. And so it was that he focused thanergy and reached into his jaw, and he made his third molars erupt.

 _When I’m feeling lonely  
_ _Sad as I can be_

The beauty of it was that the teeth were already fully formed, nested in their sockets, waiting for instruction. All he had to do was give it.

He started with the upper right, mapping out the nerves and blood vessels and the fibres of the periodontal ligament. He tested it, and it moved: the tooth shifted by micrometres. He teased out the walls of the blood vessels and extended the nerves like he was pulling on a thread. This was a bastard. Hot, sharp pain sparked through his face, making his breath catch, and the first of the blood sweat ran from his hairline.

 _All by myself, an uncharted island  
_ _In an endless sea_

His salivary glands were going haywire, set off by the nerve activity in his mouth. He swallowed and kept going. Next were the cementum and gingiva. He guided them along with the tooth as he eased it down through the socket, then followed them with hard alveolar bone, the previous expanse of the socket resorbed and reshaped. Maybe the bone adepts were on to something: there were a few things he could have usefully made from a bit of his own skeleton (though taking some of it out to use might be going a bit far). He pushed his tongue into the inside of his other cheek, out of the way, to distract from the ache that was setting in.

 _What makes me happy  
_ _Fills me up with glee_

Outwards from the foundation of gingiva and the walls of enamel, he reorganised the cells of the epithelium around the crown as it descended: some from the balcony, some from the roof. He should write a report on this. At least four of the committees would need a moment alone with it. With a final strain against his own living tissue he brought the tooth to rest, ready to fit with the one in his jaw below.

Palamedes leaned his head back, breathing hard, and felt sweat run down his neck. The right side of his face was now a hot, steady throb, the earlier inflammation from the erupting tooth multiplied on itself.

He paused a moment to rest, then moved on to the lower right tooth. Up from the jaw it arose. The next was even easier, the last one like a dream, even as every pore opened to drain out energy as well as blood. Flesh might not be his preferred necromantic medium, but it was made of the same stuff as everything else, and it recognised thanergy just like everything else.

So let us yield to thanergy. It was finished.

 _Those bones in my jaw  
_ _That don’t have a flaw_

“They're not bones,” Palamedes said, around his tongue. “We've covered this.”

He slumped to the floor and lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling. His face hurt like a motherfucker. He worked his jaw a few times and was momentarily revolted by the new pressure on the insides of his cheeks and the taste of blood. It felt—somehow—exactly like he’d just had four teeth claw their way into his mouth much too fast, and like he’d ruthlessly manipulated his own tissues to do it. It was searing, glowing pain. Blood oozed from his nose over his lips and ran down to mingle with sweat.

Palamedes laughed. He put his hand on his forehead and laughed out loud, near hysterical with exhaustion and pain. If the tooth-fuckers could see him now. (Maybe not while he was lying on the floor of his bathroom, drenched in bodily fluids. You get the idea.)

Eventually, he dragged himself off the floor and into some warm water, and then into bed, and he fell asleep satisfied and aching.

_My shiny teeth and me!_

* * *

The next morning, Palamedes sat at his desk, poking at the new teeth with his tongue. It was taking some adjustment; they felt like they were too big for the inside of his mouth, and they were still sore, but this time he approached it with pride.

The door opened, and Camilla walked in. She took one look at him and her eyes narrowed in her reinforced-vault-door face.

“What did you do,” she said.

Palamedes leaned back in his chair, twirling his pencil around his fingers. “See this robe?” he said. “I got it by necromancy. My title? Necromancy. My exceptional cavalier? Necromancy. My perfect teeth? Necromancy.”

“Now get the fuck out of your office,” Camilla said, without missing a beat.

“Why, Cam, I would never.”

Camilla walked over to him and seized him unceremoniously by the jaw. He dutifully opened his mouth as she pulled his cheek to the side.

She looked down into his jaw, then up, then right at him. “You grew out your wisdom teeth,” she said.

Palamedes raised his eyebrows in place of a reply, because she was still holding his chin up as if to slit his throat. She let him go and sat on the edge of his desk.

“Yes!” he said brightly. “Bit of flesh magic. As a treat.”

Looking at Camilla was like walking into a concrete wall. God bless her. “How much did it hurt?” she asked.

Palamedes waved his hand. “Unimportant.”

“How much does it hurt now?”

“Immaterial.”

“How much stuff did you bleed on?”

“You know,” Palamedes said, “I don’t come here to be interrogated about my dental indiscretions. Nor my—frankly disputable—departures from common sense and reasoning. Neither my insufficient fear of God.”

“Okay, then, you can work,” Camilla said. Barely a shred of sympathy in that girl, but she made up for it. She hopped off the desk and went to the pile of mail Palamedes had dumped on the table as he came in. “Few things from Oversight Body,” she said. “Aide-mémoire about that Eighth House academic who might be visiting. And you have a note from the Archivist.”

 _How_ did she _know_. Palamedes rolled his eyes heavenwards. “Make it into a dart and send it straight for my jugular. It’ll have the same effect.”

He finished the sentence he’d been writing and looked up to see that Camilla had in fact made a dart and was holding it poised, ready to strike. He grinned and leaned his head back to expose his neck.

The point landed perfectly on his left external jugular where it crossed the sternocleidomastoid. He coughed delicately, which turned into a shared snicker.

He picked up the dart from the floor and opened it.

> _Nice job.  
>  _ _Z._

This was Juno’s favourite sign-off, because the initial Z was also the uppercase letter zeta, ha ha, wasn’t that hilarious, thank God he hadn’t inherited her name. More than once he’d signed something P.S. to make it look like there was a postscript he’d neglected to write.

Palamedes took a fresh piece of flimsy and folded it in half. On the front, he wrote:

> _Before you say that I am stupidly altering my own body with flesh magic when I am not a specialist, I want to explain you a thing_

On the inside:

> _my city now_

“Where did I put the envelopes,” he said. “I want to make it look like it’s from someone else before she opens it.”

He found one, disguised his handwriting to address it, and put it in his ‘outgoing’ tray. “Archive this,” he muttered. He heard Camilla snort.

Palamedes drummed his fingers on the desk. “Cam, you should be grateful your wisdom teeth haven’t come in yet. You’ll see.”

Camilla straightened the folders on the table, which had already been straight. “No, I won’t. I don’t have any.”

“If you’re lucky I’ll—what?”

“I don’t have wisdom teeth,” said Camilla. “It’s very common, you can research it.”

Palamedes stared. He felt like he’d been punched in the face. This was on top of already feeling like he’d been punched in the face.

“Camilla,” he said. “You never had wisdom teeth. I pushed mine through my own jaw by necromantic force. We are not the same.”

She looked at him with what, on her, had to pass for pity. “Your problem is, Warden, that you’re necromantically perfect, and everyone is jealous of your good works, and that makes you rightfully upset.”

“I agree. Thank you. Wait,” he said. “I won’t accept this. Do you really not have them?”

“I really don’t. You’re welcome to check if you want.”

“No, I believe you,” Palamedes said, slouching in his chair with abject despondence. “God. The injustice.”

“You’ll live,” Camilla said. She inspected a memorandum for hazards. “Just think, when you publish your paper on it the tooth people will absolutely hate you, and they’ll have no choice but to think about it whenever they’re out there fingering somebody else’s mandible.”

“Objectively disgusting, yet comforting. Thank you.”

“Any time,” said Camilla. “Do you think if you practised enough you could give me an extra middle finger, because it would be really useful if I could—”

Palamedes beat her to it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my meme consultants xoxo
> 
> Fun fact for you: the inner ear pain and the ulcer anecdote are very real, being from Mine Own Lived Experience (though Palamedes is right about the talking part not being true).
> 
> Also, ‘two thirty’ as in 32 permanent teeth, but also as in “When is the best time to go to the dentist? Tooth hurty.” You’re welcome. I went to university for this.
> 
> P.S. I will write HtN stuff... eventually....


End file.
